Testing the Waters

Earlier this week, David Remnick interviewed Senator Barack Obama at the American Magazine Conference in Phoenix, Arizona. Here is a transcript of their conversation. For an audio recording (46 minutes), click here to listen or right-click to download.

Earlier this week, David Remnick interviewed Senator Barack Obama at the American Magazine Conference in Phoenix, Arizona. Here is a transcript of their conversation. For an audio recording (46 minutes), click here to listen or right-click to download.

DAVID REMNICK: Please welcome Barack Obama….

BARACK OBAMA: Thank you.

You have this new book.

I do.

Yes. On page 100—

Uh-oh.

I read the book!

I appreciate that.

You’re talking about your earliest days in the Senate, and you go to see Robert Byrd. And Robert Byrd gives you the time of day, and he wants to give you his best advice—he’s been in the Senate for approximately two hundred and forty years. And he says the following: “We spoke about the Senate’s past, the presidents he had known and the bills he had managed. He told me I would do well in the Senate but that I shouldn’t be in too much of a rush—so many senators today became fixated on the White House, not understanding that in the constitutional design it was the Senate that was supreme, the heart and soul of the Republic.” Are you going to follow his advice?

You just got the award for the most creative lead-in on a question I’ve been getting. First of all, visiting with Robert Byrd is a ritual that every senator has to go through. And it’s an amazing scene, going into his office and seeing all the history on display. And I think that what he’s absolutely right about is that we tend to think about politics in terms of individual ambition, and most of us who get there—I write in the book that, no matter what people say, there’s some level of megalomania involved in getting to the United States Senate.

Which you plead guilty to.

Absolutely. Because you start off presuming that somehow you can represent your state better than anybody there, and put yourself through and your family through all kinds of misery to get there. So I think his advice more broadly is advice I try to take to heart, and that is to make sure that, whatever it is that I do, that I’m not solely driven by what’s inside me, and what I’m driven by, but also by what the country needs, and what institutions need, and you have to be respectful of those institutions.

What about the specific advice?

Well, the specific advice I’m going to take under advisement. As I indicated, I haven’t had much time to absorb much advice over the last—

But you’ve changed on this. In 2004, you went on Russert’s show and said, No way, I’m going to fill out my term. Yesterday, not so much.

Well, look, it’s been a busy two years. It does give you some sense of the sort of comical aspects of this, that Russert’s original interview was literally a week after I’d been elected to the Senate, and I was already fielding questions about higher office. And at that time it was absolutely true that I thought, Well, that doesn’t make any sense—I haven’t been sworn in yet. Now, there’s some, I think, who would argue that it still might not make sense after having only served two years in the U.S. Senate. And that’s something that I very much appreciate. I understand it.

Let’s say that you’re considering it, which is basically what you said yesterday, that you’re considering it now. What is the thought process of considering? What are the factors, yea and nay? Is this moment, 2008, a unique political moment that you worry may not come up again? Take the Colin Powell experience, for example. There was that moment in time where, if he had jumped in, it’s quite likely he would have gone very far—maybe not to the end, but—and that moment then passed.

Well, I think there are a couple of things. We are at an interesting moment in our political history, because I think that we have gone through a cycle, of maybe fifteen years, twenty years, in which—as I write about in the book—it feels as if many of the battles of the sixties have been refought, over and over again, and the cast of characters who were involved have taken a lot of the frameworks of the sixties—what it means to be a conservative, what it means to be a liberal—and just gone at it. And the country’s been very polarized and very divided as a consequence. And you do get a sense that there’s this hunger for a different kind of politics, one that hopefully is, from my perspective, at least, is strongly progressive, and recognizes the need for government to play a role in broadening opportunity for people, but that scrambles some of the old categories, and is less embedded in some of these old battles. And that, I think, is an enormous opportunity. I think that is an enormous opportunity particularly for Democrats.

It’s a way of saying that you need somebody younger than a baby boomer.

No, because it could be attitudinal as well, but the point, though, is that I think the country wants something different. Now, you asked about the process I go through. I go through a couple of things. Number one, do I have a message that’s useful to that moment? I like to think I have a message that’s useful to that moment. I like to think that I can contribute to that, otherwise I wouldn’t have written this book. Then, there’s the question of whether I am the right messenger for whatever message that is. And that’s not clear as well, because, like anybody in politics, I’ve got strengths and I’ve got weaknesses, both politically and substantively. And then there’s a third question, which I mentioned, I think, maybe on an earlier interview this week, which is that the bargain you strike with the American people when you run is to basically say, “You put me in this office, and I am giving over to you my entire life. But not just mine—also my family’s life.”

Are they ready for that?

Well, it’s not clear that they are ready for it, or that I even want to put them in a position where they’ve got to make that decision.

If I can mention another passage in the book, there’s a great scene, extraordinarily honest, where you decide to tell your wife that you are going to run for office, obviously after long consideration, an idea that she was not too crazy about at all, and you describe, with great subtlety, how in the morning you were only getting a peck on the cheek, at best—which, by the way, was a brilliant piece of writing, because I think all married couples knew what that meant. I’ve got to say that if you run for President you’re going to be the first priest who ever made it to the White House, unless her attitude has changed markedly.

No. . . . Look, one of the wonderful things about my wife, and I write about this in the book—I value this enormously—is, she cares more about whether I’m a good father and a good husband than she does about whether I’m a U.S. senator. As she likes to say, she would be my No. 1 political supporter—she’d make calls and raise money, etc.—if I were her neighbor. She would be leading the bandwagon for me to run for President if I was married to somebody else.

But you’re not making an announcement at the present time.

No.

Good, good.

But those are all factors that you’ve got to walk through, and, as I said on Russert yesterday, look, this is serious business. And I will say—I’ve got to be careful here to make sure my publishers don’t get mad, because all this stuff is converging precisely at the time when I’m bringing a book out, and obviously publicity is good—that I have always been suspicious of our celebrity culture. And now I find myself in this odd position where I am a part of it, and to some degree a beneficiary of it. We cycle through the new and the novel, and stack story after story on top of individuals, until we lose track of who we’re talking about. And if you get absorbed in that you lose track of who you’re talking about.

I think you told somebody that you were in danger of becoming more overexposed than Paris Hilton.

I did! And that, I think, is something that you have to battle against. On the one hand, I’m a public figure, and I wouldn’t have gone into public life if I wasn’t interested in shaping the debate and moving it forward.

John Kennedy was the youngest man ever elected to the Presidency. He had three terms in the House and then a full term in the Senate. What constitutes being ready for that office? We’re now in the second term of a President who had a couple of terms as governor of Texas, and who was also described on the cover of Rolling Stone in a piece by Sean Wilentz, the American historian, as the worst President we’ve ever had in American history. Is that, by the way, is that an assessment you share?

You know—[to the audience] see that little segue there, “by the way,” just as an aside. You know, I’m not a historian, so— There’s a hotel, I think it’s the Capitol Hilton, in Washington; and downstairs, where there are a lot of banquet halls, there’s a whole row of all the presidents. You walk by the forty-three that have been there and you realize there are only about ten who you have any idea what they did. So this answers both questions. I don’t know exactly what makes somebody ready to be President. It’s not clear that J.F.K. was “ready” to be President, it’s not clear that Harry Truman, when he was elevated, was “ready,” and yet, somehow, some people respond and some people don’t. My instinct is that people who are ready are folks who go into it understanding the gravity of their work, and are able to combine vision and judgment. Having knowledge is important. I’m one of those folks—I wouldn’t probably fit in with the Administration—who actually thinks that being informed is a good basis for policy. That was a little—

No, that was good!

That was sort of a cheap shot. But the interesting thing, when you are in Washington, what struck me was how many really smart, capable people are around you all the time, offering you great ideas on every problem under the sun.

But you’re the mediating intelligence as the President.

That’s exactly right. That’s what I meant in terms of combining vision and judgment. I think what—and this, I don’t think this is just true of the President; I think this is true of leadership generally. I suspect that for those who are publishing and editors who are doing a good job leading their institutions, your job is to figure out—sifting through all that knowledge, synthesizing it, and then making some judgments about why we do this instead of that to get to this place and to be able to focus, in the case of the President, the country’s attention on how to get there.

Part of what makes experience, and part of what makes maybe somebody road-tested is the amount of trials that you’ve been through in politics. In elected politics, by your own admission, you’ve been pretty lucky.

More than pretty lucky. Very lucky.

Real lucky. And, in terms of government, you’ve been in the Senate for a few years. What has been the toughest thing you’ve had to face as a senator?

As a U.S. senator?

Yes.

Well, as a U.S. senator, being in the minority is always tough. Keep in mind, though, that I was in the [Illinois] state senate for seven years before I was in the U.S. Senate. And, to some degree, the experiences in the state legislature are identical to Congress, except that there are a lot of reporters around in Washington and there are virtually none in the state capitol. But the pattern of legislative activity is very similar, and the political dynamic was similar, because when I first arrived at the state legislature, we had an old guy who was the senate president, named “Pate” Philip. And he was not a neoconservative but the original paleoconservative. He was a big, hulking guy. He looked like John Murtha, but had very different politics, and would chomp on cigars and make politically incorrect statements, and he had adopted Newt Gingrich’s—

Contract—

Not just Contract with America; he had adopted Newt Gingrich’s rules for running the House. As a consequence, you couldn’t even amend a bill without his approval. So I went for the first six years, maybe passing ten bills, maybe five of them substantive, and was extraordinarily frustrated. We attained the majority the seventh year and I passed twenty-six bills in a row. In one year. Reformed the death penalty in Illinois, expanded health care for kids, set up a state earned-income tax credit. It wasn’t that I was smarter in year seven than I was in year six, or more experienced; it was that we had power. And so the frustration, or the difficulty, that I feel in the U.S. Senate is very similar. You can have the best agenda in the world, but if you don’t control the gavel you cannot move an agenda forward. And, when you do control the gavel, not only can you move an agenda forward but you can actually [move them]. I constantly see opportunities for collaboration across ideological lines to get stuff done. But you have to be the one who’s dictating how the compromises work. If it’s somebody who’s not interested in compromising who’s in charge, you can come up with all sorts of good ideas, and they’ll stiff you. If you’re the person who somebody else has to come to, you can actually engage, and that’s how, for example, we got the death-penalty reform. We set up the first videotaping of interrogations and confessions on capital cases. We were in the majority at that point, but I still reached out to all the law-enforcement folks, and we just sat down in a room. And that is, by the way, the most gratifying feeling in politics, for me: when you hit that sweet spot where everybody concludes that the law that we’ve just passed works and is going to make things better, and everybody across party lines has to confess that we’re probably better off with this thing than not.

Where do you find yourself having the biggest differences with Hillary Clinton, politically?

You know, I think very highly of Hillary. The more I get to know her, the more I admire her. I think she’s the most disciplined—one of the most disciplined people—I’ve ever met. She’s one of the toughest. She’s got an extraordinary intelligence. And she is, she’s somebody who’s in this stuff for the right reasons. She’s passionate about moving the country forward on issues like health care and children. So it’s not clear to me what differences we’ve had since I’ve been in the Senate. I think what people might point to is our different assessments of the war in Iraq, although I’m always careful to say that I was not in the Senate, so perhaps the reason I thought it was such a bad idea was that I didn’t have the benefit of U.S. intelligence. And, for those who did, it might have led to a different set of choices. So that might be something that sort of is obvious. But, again, we were in different circumstances at that time: I was running for the U.S. Senate, she had to take a vote, and casting votes is always a difficult test.

How would one run against Hillary Clinton, in that sense?

Oh, I don’t know.

You never gave it any thought?

I haven’t.

You sure?

Positive.

Let’s go back to my President Bush question. Obviously, you want to answer it in quite the—

[to the audience] He’s a troublemaker, you notice? He sounds so much nicer in his columns.

Yeah. Sorry to disabuse you of that.

[to the audience] He turns out to be kind of a prickly guy.

You said prickly. Some people on the left, and as you put it in the blogosphere, have been pretty tough on you about being maybe too mild about the Bush Administration. I guess what I’d like to hear, and what other people would like to hear, is a kind of sustained critique yea or nay for the Bush Administration.

Nay.

Nay. But maybe a little more sustained than that. And has the Bush Administration done anything good, in your view?

Let’s start with what they’ve done well. Something that I have tried to give them credit for publicly—and I think says something about how they think about their base, and how that shapes their politics—is actually on AIDS in Africa, and around the world. They have followed through on that investment. I just came back from Africa in August, and there’s still some ideological issues in terms of condom use, and abstinence, and all that stuff, but, in terms of investing, in a serious way, to try to make a difference in Africa, where—

On the ground—

—on the ground, and there’s no obvious political payoff for that. And that speaks to the passion of the evangelical community on this issue, which I think has influenced the Administration and the President, and I think that’s something that deserves a lot of credit. And it points to an opportunity over the long term to engage the evangelical community—not, you know, the hard Christian right but people like Rick Warren, or T. D. Jakes, these kinds of guys, who I think are very sincere about what they believe is their Christian mandate to help the poor. So that’s something I think they’ve done well. I would say that my overarching critique is that this has been probably the most ideologically driven Administration in my memory. And I’m trying to cast back—I don’t know how far I’d have to go back to find one, a combination of a House, Senate, and White House, that has been so obstinate in resisting facts, dissenting opinions, compromise. Everything is based on a set of preconceived notions that ignore whatever reality and information comes at them.

But does this seem like a—I don’t mean to harp on this, but this seems like an Administration that you disagree with, or that you look at as a disaster.

Well, I think that this Administration has done great damage to this country.

Specifically where? Where are, say, the three areas that are the worst?

Foreign policy, I think, is the most obvious. I think the war in Iraq has been—was flawed not just in execution but in conception, and has done enormous damage to our standing around the world. I think it has weakened us in our capacity to deal with terrorism. It has—we have used so much political capital there that we have not been effective on issues like Iran, North Korea, Darfur. We have no chits to use up. It has gutted our military. It’s going to probably take the same amount of time that it took for the military to recover from Vietnam. That’s how long it’s going to take for us to be able to recover when it comes to Iraq. And the tone of unilateralism—which, by the way, I think is reversible, just not while this Administration is in office—but that tone has created an atmosphere around the world that is impeding us on a whole host of issues.

Even in Africa, ironically.

Absolutely. So that, I think, would be the most obvious damage. I would say, domestically, our national debt and budget constrain us in ways that are going to be very far-reaching, and long-lasting. And I think whoever is elected in 2008 is going to be cleaning up the fiscal mess that was created as a consequence of the President’s tax cuts. And the third point I guess I would make, and this cuts across issues—it’s true with health care, it’s true with energy, it’s true with education—is the incapacity to take serious action around a set of issues that, if we don’t deal with now, will leave us in either an uncompetitive position, in the case of energy, an environmental point of no return. It’s the fact that we didn’t get started on a whole host of issues that we shouldn’t be starting right now, because it takes long lead times to change the schools, or it takes long lead times to develop alternative energy sources. I think those are years of missed opportunity that make it harder for us to deal with them in the future.

Senator, one of the most interesting aspects of this book, and it also elides to the previous book, too, is your attitude about religion and your discussion about religion, and, I don’t know how many people have had a chance to read the book quite yet, but it is very frank in the sense that you were brought up in a distinctly secular home, and that you have great doubts, even now, about belief in God. I wouldn’t ask you something so blunt as “Do you believe in God, do you not believe in God”; I’ll leave that for other venues. But your attitude toward evangelicals is to bring them in and not face them in a kind of oppositional way. And yet you feel compelled to talk about yourself and your personal life in religious terms. I wonder if you found that hard to write about, or if you found it necessary to write about, in order to go up to the next level in American politics.

Well—

Not that your belief is necessary but that, rather, the discussion of it is necessary.

No, no, no, I understand. You know, I felt it was necessary in part because of—again, I think this is the historical moment we’re in—we have come to define religion in absolutist, fundamentalist terms. So to be a believer is to be a fundamentalist in some fashion. And I guess what I was trying to describe is a faith that admits doubt, and uncertainty, and mystery. Because, ultimately, I think that’s how most people understand their faith. In fact, it’s not faith if you’re absolutely certain. There’s a leap that we all take, and, when you admit that doubt publicly, it’s a form of testimony. Then what I think it does is it allows both the secular and the religious to find some sort of common space where we say to each other, Well, I may not believe exactly what you do, what you believe, but I share an experience in wondering what does my life mean, or I understand the desire for a connection to something larger than myself. And that, I think, is in the best of the United States religious tradition.

How old were you when you came to the church?

I was, I must have been twenty-seven? Twenty-eight? And, as I said in the book, look, there are still passages that I read in the Bible, that I say, Well, this doesn’t make any sense.

Do you think that’ll be a problematic confession when it reaches—if it ever does reach—the national political stage?

No. One of the things that I argue in the book is that—

Forgive me, but I think you have a sentence in the book where you say that there are more people that believe in angels than in—

Evolution.

Darwinian evolution. And, take it as you will, that seems to suggest that that would be problematic to—

Well, I think that if people want to know my opinion I will tell them, I think, evolution is more grounded, in my experience, at least, than angels. I don’t know, but—I mean, I can’t be positive. I don’t think that will offend the majority of Americans. I think that—

What about confessing to drug use? You talk about marijuana and cocaine.

Oh, look, you know, when I was a kid, I inhaled. Frequently. That was the point.

It was, wasn’t it?

You know, it’s, it’s not something I make light of. It’s something that I wrote actually about in my first book, and it was reflective of the struggles and confusion of a teen-age boy. And in that sense, I think, the vast majority of Americans understand that teen-age boys are frequently confused.

It’s all flashing in front of me. The Chicago Tribune had a series of articles about, a couple of months ago, about Dennis Hastert and a certain transportation bill, and a guy who came into the House worth a few hundred thousand dollars is going to leave the House worth, I don’t know, five, six million dollars, as a result of this transportation bill that made land that he owns alongside Illinois highways immensely more valuable, which you voted for and worked on.

Didn’t know about the land at the time, but—

How do you feel about the Hastert piece of it?

You know, I think that it is critical to figure out at all times how to guard against appearances of impropriety. I don’t know the details of what transpired with respect to the Speaker. I have tried to be scrupulous in terms of my own behavior, but, look, there are times where, you know, I can get caught up in the relationships that you have—you know, you have a supporter who is a longtime friend who suddenly they get into trouble, and you’re caught off guard. What I’m most concerned about is the structural or systematic institutional problems that I write about—not so much the rank corruption, you know, the Duke Cunninghams, or the Bob Neys; but more the steady and pervasive influence that money has in Washington. And contributions are just a part of it. As I remind people, the biggest advantage that big money has in Washington is a host of full-time lobbyists who can track that one bill that, for their client, means a billion-dollar tax break, but that nobody else even knows is there.

Did you feel it weighing on your shoulders from the moment you entered the Senate?

What I feel is that the budget process in particular is so undisciplined, and so opaque, that it is very difficult for any senator to know what you’re voting on when it comes to budgetary matters at any given time. You’ve got this big monster bill. And those who control that process are able to slip in and massage and work on whatever they want. So I worked with an unlikely partner, Republican Tom Coburn, to set up a Google for government, that requires all federal spending over twenty-five thousand dollars to be on the Internet. Even making that a more effective database, it can be helpful to the reporters of some of the magazines in this room, and yet it is still not how you would want a budget to work. And it provides enormous opportunities for mischief.

I’ve got one more question, and then we’re going to have some questions from the audience. Being a politician is a crazy way to live.

It is ridiculous.

You split your time between home and the fleshpots of Washington, you have to raise money all the time, shake hands, people tell you stuff, they ask rude stuff on platforms. You could be changing the world in many different ways. Do you ever have doubts about yourself as a pol? One of the distinguishing features of this book is that you allow doubt into the picture. Most politicians chase that away as a first gesture. Do you ever think this really is a nutty way to do business?

Every day.

Every day.

Every day. And I don’t mean that as a joke. I mean, once a day I say to myself, It’s not clear that my family wouldn’t be happier, and I wouldn’t be accomplishing just as much outside of politics, and it would cause less stress and less strain. What keeps me in it so far has been an abiding faith in democracy. And I don’t mean that in a corny way. I have town-hall meetings, and I write about that in the book. And attendance varies, and this is all across the state of Illinois, which is a wonderful microcosm of the country, because it’s urban and rural, and North and South. Some of the town-hall meetings will have a hundred, two hundred people. Sometimes we have two thousand. And you walk in and you get a mike and you just start opening yourself up to questions. And you hear these incredible stories that people tell, about single moms who are trying to get health care for their kids, or a veteran who is struggling with disability payments. You get unlikely comments. You go to a little farm community, and somebody’s concerned about Darfur, or you go to—I write about going to a South Side church with a whole black inner-city congregation and somebody asks you about farm policy, and what you realize is that, in fits and starts, and very imperfectly, when the country is engaged we really do have the best form of government yet conceived. And the idea of being a part of that, and helping that along, is very attractive to me. When I’m in that moment, interacting with constituents, and when I feel like I’m learning or teaching, it’s like being in a big classroom. I was a constitutional-law professor for ten years, and that’s how it feels. It’s just being in a big classroom, and every once in a while a light bulb goes off.

Will you feel that way when—right now, you are hitting a peak of the curve. You’re on the cover of Time, you’re doing a publicity tour for a book, you’ve mainly gotten adulation and good reviews. You haven’t had a bad play yet on Forty-second Street. Are you going to be able to withstand the other part of the curve, that comes to every politician and every public figure.

Well, keep in mind, I lost a congressional race.

To Bobby Rush.

And none of you knew about it. But I was completely mortified and humiliated, and felt terrible. The biggest problem in politics, is the fear of loss. It’s a very public thing, which most people don’t have to go through. Obviously, the flip side of publicity and hype is when you fall, folks are right there, snapping away. And so that is something naturally you worry about, but my hope is that I’ve been in this long enough and through this process enough that I take the good with the bad and don’t read the good press clippings or the bad press clippings.

Some questions. Yes? [question inaudible] To make it a lot shorter: Is the White House a house worth inheriting, considering the shape that this gentleman obviously thinks it’s in.

It’s a legitimate question, because I think the next President is going to have a lot of problems to clean up and not a lot of resources to work with. So whoever is elected is going to have to have a conversation with the American people about what our challenges are, what steps we can take, how long it’s going to take, and ask that they join, that they take ownership in this project. You know—I was just mentioning town-hall meetings—one of the things that invariably come up when I’m in town-hall meetings is, I’ll have ten or fifteen questions, mostly relating to “We need more money for health care,” or “Why did the prescription-drug bill have a doughnut hole in it,” or “The roads need to be built,” etc., and then somebody in the audience will say, “And when are we going to get rid of that death tax?” And it’s a terrific—I have a friend who teaches and talks about teachable moments. And it’s a great teachable moment, where you say to them, You know, I hope at some point I need to wiggle my way out of the inheritance tax, since, by 2009, seven million dollars will be exempted for a couple passing on to their kids. But, I said, completely eliminating it will cost a trillion dollars. Now, we have three options to achieve that. We can borrow a trillion dollars from China, which is what we’ve been doing; we can tax the 99.5 per cent of the population an extra trillion dollars to make up for the tax cut for the top .5 per cent; or we can cut a trillion dollars’ worth of programs. And here’s what that would involve, because we’d have to put Medicaid benefits, and Medicare benefits, and student-loan programs, and so forth. So who are we? What are our values? Is that something that’s a priority to us? And, invariably, if you have the capacity to have that conversation, people make the right choice. They say, All right. That doesn’t make sense. And maybe there’s a way we can exempt small businesses, and family farms so they can get passed on. But, no, we shouldn’t do that. We shouldn’t make that choice. That’s the power of the Presidency that I don’t see used enough. The capacity to explain to the American people in very prosaic, straightforward terms: here are the choices we have. The biggest problem we have in our politics, and our campaigns press this upon candidates, is to lie about the choices that have to be made. And to obfuscate and to fudge. And so by the time the person arrives there people are already set up for disappointment. And my wife—you know, I love talking to her. She takes pride in considering herself like the Everyperson—who happens to have gone to Princeton and Harvard Law School. But, to her credit, I mean, she grew up on the South Side of Chicago, working-class family, and that’s why she’s so suspicious of this hype surrounding me now, and she’s absolutely right, because she says, you know, people don’t want hard choices. Everybody’s all happy and feel-good, until you actually say to them, Well, you know what? Actually, if we have a real energy plan it’s going to cost something. There’s not a magic energy store where we can buy a new gadget; we’re going to have to invest and make some tough decisions. But I do think the American people respond better to that conversation than we give them credit for, and it’s not tried often enough.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Let us say in the next election the Democrats win both the House and the Senate. In 2008, whether you run for President or not, what would you say were the three most important priorities that the new President, with a Democratic Congress, should present to the American people as the things that need to get done?

Well, it is hard to anticipate at this point where we’re going to be in Iraq. But first priority would be to stabilize and extricate ourselves from the morass that we’re in right now. I’ve called for a phased withdrawal; I hope that the Baker-Hamilton commission helps to move us in that direction. I think not only do we have to engage the Iraqis but also the regional powers, including Iran and Syria, in a conversation about stabilizing the area, and force them to recognize that they’ve got a self-interest. If we’re not there, they’ve got a big self-interest in making sure that country does not utterly collapse. More broadly, and this I think would be one of the most important things a new President can do, is to essentially figure out what is the updated version of the post-World War II order that was structured by Truman and Acheson, and Marshall and Kennan—what does that look like? What is our national-security strategy? Because we’ve never gone through that process. In the nineties, the basic feeling was, you know, as long as McDonald’s are opening up all over the world everything’s going to be O.K. And then we had 9/11, and immediately launched into a unilateral, sabre-rattling approach to foreign policy. But what we’ve never really done is thought strategically about how, in an age of asymmetrical warfare, with countries like China and Russia that are no longer direct enemies, but are clearly competitors, and huge chunks of the world that are essentially collapsing and ungoverned—what does that mean for us? And what does that mean for our military? So that would be point No. 1. On the domestic front, I would say that it is time for the Democrats to get over what happened in ’94, and to move on an aggressive plan for health-care reform in this country. And I personally think universal health care remains a vital goal for us to meet. And I think for us to shy away from it robs the Democrats of any claim of dealing with one of the most pressing issues—not just for individual families but also for our economy and our competitiveness. And the third, which I’ve already, I think, hinted at, is energy. I believe Al Gore—and the other, you know, ten thousand scientists out there. I know there are those two holdouts in the White House. From a national-security posture, there’s not a better thing we could do—for example, dealing with proliferation issues in Iran—than to drive the price of oil down to twenty-five bucks a barrel. It’s the single biggest thing we could do to effectuate change and cut the legs out of some of the fundamentalist impulses in the Middle East. And so why we’re not pursuing that in a very aggressive way baffles me. And I think the country’s ready for it. I mentioned that, travelling around the country, what I’ve been struck by is the degree to which, despite gas prices going down, the issue of energy policy is still registering very high among voters. They recognize that the current path we’re on is unsustainable.

REMNICK: Senator, on behalf of everybody here, I want to thank you for your time.

David Remnick has been editor of The New Yorker since 1998 and a staff writer since 1992.